Ashton Aeris District 11

Ash is a rather average looking girl. She isn't the prettiest girl around District eleven, but she isn't ugly. Plain is a nice word to describe her appearance. Her hair is a wavy dark brown that could make her features appear more striking, but it is rare to find her hair in anything but her signature bun. You'll always find her with mud smeared over her face and her messy bun spilling strands of hair that she never bothers to put back up. She was raised with boys in a hard working family. Her hair annoys her because it is such a nuisance. When she was younger, she would often cut her hair by herself. Of course, she would have to do it secretly. Usually, she would go out to the sheep pastures and use the sheep shears to chop off her locks. Her mother was not pleased. Ash never cared though. She never cared until the day she started attending school, when kids would laugh at her. She stopped chopping off her hair. It wasn't like she couldn't take the culprits who laughed at her, despite her small frame and lack of height, Ash was a strong muscled young girl. She would play with her brothers as rough as if she were their height and age. Having three years on her put Ash at quite a disadvantage. However, she learned how to use her own strengths and eventually could hold her own. Violence was obviously not accepted on any school grounds, and so Ash couldn't use her muscles against them. She was often taunted for her clothes. She liked to wear boy clothes. Her family couldn't afford to buy new clothes for each child, so she often took from her older brothers. It was a choice for her, because she could wear her mothers old clothes, she just preferred to wear lose fitting clothes. She liked to run around and knew she would feel silly wrestling around in a dress. So her clothes consisted of loose fitting long sleeve shirts and shorts, that her brothers grew out years ago.

Ashton has bright green eyes. Her eyes can be piercing, especially on her hard sullen face. Her cheekbones are striking, and when she glares, it can be quite startling. Her nose is a small, almost like a cute little button on such a bold face. Her cheeks are not soft, nor are they round. Her face is hard hitting, to match her body and personality. Coming from a farming family, she was well fed, but she never took more than what she needed. She was never over fed, but she always could count on her meals. Because of this, she was a skinny lean girl, but she never was overweight. With her large family and all the work she did, she only barely had enough to eat. From all the work she did outside, she also was very tan. She was working in the hot summer months throughout the entire summer, and over the years has built up a tan that never seems to fade. She sees it as an advantage from not facing as many sun burns as she would if she were pale. Ashton’s arms are very tan, but also, they have enormous muscles. It’s alarming to look at her arms for the first time and notice how large and defined they are. She says it’s from all the heavy lifting she has learned to do from the farm work.

Ash is a tomboy. From an early age, she took to following around her two older twin brothers, Siyah and Akia. She never was one to play with her younger sisters, Meri and Autumn. Ashton was a spunky girl who would rather wrestle around in the mud than do anything a girl should do. Her brothers respected her, even if she was three years younger, and they enjoyed rough housing with her. Ash took her place in her family seriously, and only found it acceptable to be ranked along with her brothers. She liked it when they spoke of all three of them, instead of just the twins. It was often wondered if Ash wished they were triplets, or maybe wished she had a twin brother. Whatever it was, Ash wasn't leaving the little group she had formed inside her family any time soon. If they were going to have fun, she would be right along with them.

Ashton was a nice person, to the right person. She wasn’t exactly out of her way friendly to everyone, but if someone talked to her, she’d be nice and friendly to them even if she barely knew them. It wasn’t hard to recognize everyone in her district, and so friendships were developed between Ash and some of the other kids. She was a great friend, but she tended to have no girl friends. They didn’t seem to like what she was about. She was always caked in mud and smelling like an animal, so it wasn’t exactly surprising for her family to learn that she only befriended boys. It was easy for Ash to be friends with the boys when she was younger, because they didn’t seem to be phased that she was only hanging out with boys. Back then you could be friends with everyone and no one seemed to care. Being a teenager was different. Finding friends who didn’t think you were weird for always being different was more of a challenge. Ash found that keeping to herself was more of the way to survive school, and so she rarely had friends to talk to. She wasn’t shy by nature, more like she was turned shy because she was scared to open to people and be faced with rejection for who she was.

In reality, Ashton could be a sensitive person. She’ll never show it, but she is often left hurt when people show how much they dislike her, or her brothers decide to leave her out of something. She isn’t a stone wall because she enjoys rough housing. She feels pain easily, and often can show her sensitive side. On the sheep farm her family runs, she often is around the animals making them feel at ease and even bottle feeding some of the young ones. Her heart is definitely in the right place, she just has a hard time expressing herself. Being friends with only boys has been hard for her. She’s awkward around girls, because she knows they judge her. Now that the boys judge her too, there really isn’t anything she can do about it. She doesn’t exactly have anyone to turn to.

She has only loved one person, and that did not turn out well for her. She never had the guts to tell him, and eventually he joined in to being hostile around her, slowly breaking her heart one day at a time. The sadness she felt from his betrayal was mortifying for her. Ash couldn’t tell anyone. She didn’t have anyone close enough that she could talk to about that stuff. Of course, there was always her mother, but she wasn’t exactly close with her mom like that. In her despair, she ended up sitting far away from her home in the sheep pasture and spilling her life story to the grazing animals. It turned out they were good listeners. Ashton has found herself venting to the sheep more than once.

Ashton was born to Peter and Jacqueline Aeris. Peter’s family owned a large sheep farm and gave him two breeding sheep for his wedding present. Peter and Jacqueline had already decided to raise a farm together, and were thrilled to have something to start them out. They bought their first house with the money Jacqueline’s parents had given them, and started a small farm. It wasn’t long before Jacqueline was pregnant with her twin boys, and soon there were two bouncing baby boys crying around the house as the sheep flock slowly gained numbers. It took three years for the new parents to get accustomed to raising children before they decided to try again when the boys were only 2 and a half. Siyah and Akia were growing fast, and it left Peter with most of the farm work while Jacqueline was facing parenting inside the house. When Ashton was born, the house dynamic shifted. Siyah and Akia were told to be quiet around their baby sister because she was a delicate soul. Siyah and Akia took their jobs seriously as protector and as they watched their baby sister grow, they learned many things about being protectors. When they reached the age of four, Peter began to bring them out into the sheep area with him. They began following Peter around the shepherd dogs the family owned and soon were herding the sheep, or at least attempting to, right along beside the dogs. That was when Peter began his vegetable garden. The family was thriving off of selling the wool of the sheep and selling the sheep to other farmers and to the butcher. The family was earning a nice profit for the size of the family, but in the next four years, the family had grown by two more. Autumn and Meri were much smaller than Ashton had been, and Jacqueline was quite worried about them. At age four and two, they had already developed two different sets of coughs and had been losing a bit of weight that kept Jacqueline in a constant worry. Doctor trips for the girls were numerous and the family found themselves losing money because of the expense of their health. At this time, the boys were ten and Ashton was seven. They were all helping their father out in the fields. Ashton took to the sheep. She enjoyed taking care of them more than the vegetables because she felt like they were actually alive. The boys were used for the hard labor and often found themselves pulling roots and towing the land in order to get it ready for planting season. They would tug large barrels across the farmland and learned to work the machinery at only the age of twelve. Ashton was only a little bit jealous. She liked to assume her brothers were her equals. Every day after their farm chores had been finished, she would challenge them to a fight. They would eagerly accept, and the wrestling would begin.

Ashton began wrestling them after she spent months convincing them she wasn’t as precious and fragile as her mother had once told them. She might be smaller than them, but that was much more of a reason to train against them. They had nothing better to do, so they decided to give her a shot. It turned out, she was quite good at wrestling and slowly, the boys began to think of her as one of the boys. Ashton was proud of her accomplishment, and even began to convince her dad to let her operate the machinery. He reluctantly agreed, and soon she was doing everything that her brothers were doing. She considered herself one of the boys, and began playing with the neighborhood boys. She didn’t have a lot of kids around her house, but the boys who were easily took her up purely because they wanted the joy of beating a girl. They didn’t get to feel that joy. She matched their games easily and even sometimes managed to beat them. Of course, she lost a few games as well, but nonetheless, they enjoyed her spirit. At that young age of eleven she felt like she was on fire. It wasn’t until the next year, the first year she would be entered into the reaping that she would see just how small she actually was. Like every other family in Panam, she watched the games. She stared mystified at the sizes of some of the tributes, like the boys from District 1 and 2. They were massive. She often would compare them to her twin brothers, who were huge, but to the tributes from the other Districts, they didn’t even compare. Ashton would stare sadly as she watched her twin brothers line up with other kids from the District and pray that their names were not called. It wasn’t until Ashton had her name in the reaping for the first time that she felt the pain of life and death tear inside of her. She would always look at her siblings for reassurance as she waited for the tributes to be called. They were never her. And they were never her siblings. She felt the sigh of relieve, but always felt her heart break for the unfortunate kids who were not as lucky. She couldn’t remember the last time District Eleven had won the games.

She was seventeen now, which made Autumn fifteen and Meri thirteen. They were much better at being girls. Ashton often watched boys swoon over her younger siblings. She couldn’t blame them. They were very pretty girls for their age and they knew to leave their long wavy brown hair down for all to view. This annoyed Ashton, because kids would ask why she didn’t leave her hair down. They said if she looked more like her siblings, they were sure she’d manage to have a friend. Ashton didn’t need that. She liked her hair the way it was. She would keep it in her bun, and she would continue to go through life the way she wanted. She didn’t need anyone. She had her brothers, and she had her job. She didn’t need to marry boys. Sure, she often looked at the boys of her District. But none of them noticed her for who she was, so why should she let them notice her for her looks? No. This was her life, and she would live it how she wanted to.